1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a storage method and a search method for mark events on two-dimensional space.
2. Description of Related Art
With coming of an era of Web 2.0, Websites with rich contents and community interactions provide a large amount of map services such as Google maps, Yahoo! maps, Windows live local, for providing information to users. To provide fast online mapping services to users, related techniques are continuously developed. For example, a Japanese patent application laid-open publication no. JP2005338496 discloses a map display system, in which a map is divided into a plurality of small regions based on a numerical feature of latitudes and longitudes, and such small regions are stored as images. The latitudes and the longitudes are used as indexes for searching images, so as to accelerate map searching.
Such online mapping service allows the users to search landmarks, to browse the map by dragging and dropping, to flag data points on the map and to mark an area with polygon lines for customizing related information on the map. Map data may be enriched via annotation effort of the whole community, so as to share the information.
After data of the online mapping service is enriched, inquiry performed based on the latitudes and the longitudes may have a poor performance due to a large amount of data. During inquiring of rectangular regions on map, the amount of data (i.e. the latitudes information and the longitudes information having numerical continuity) required to be searched is much more.
Accordingly, the present invention is directed to a storage method and a search method for mark events on a two-dimensional space, by which system cost and system performance may be well balanced.